Our kitchen is now 99.5% complete and I wanted to share some pics. Although it is tiny, I call it the 'Taj Ma Kitchen." If you see the before pics, you'll understand. Before pics have orange or green walls. Shadows in the finished pics make the whites look different, but in person everything matches. The construction dust that got into the camera didn't help either!
When we purchased our house (built in 1923), the previous owner had installed white beadboard and painted the walls with shiny orange paint. But hey, at least the fridge and stove were newer. The sink was very shallow, there was no dishwasher, and the stove and refrigerator bumped each other when opened. We immediately painted the walls green (from SW's historic collection - in hindsight, a mistake, but hey, anything was better than orange) and took a few months to figure out what we could do with the kitchen. We're still not sure if the cabinets were original to the house or if they were from a 1950s remodel, but they were terrible.
Obstacles (besides the kitchen being tiny) included the need for a reduced depth counter behind the door, a 3-story brick chimney in the corner that we could not remove, the fact that the basement stairwell is behind another wall, and the doorway to the dining room was in the middle of the wall. There was also a soffit above the cabinets that worried us, because we didn't want to tear it out to find pipes or something important concealed (luckily, there was nothing back there).
After wasting time with Sears, Home Depot, Lowe's and a local cabinet shop, we decided (on a whim) to tear out the pantry and make that our new doorway. This gave us enough wall space to have the stove and fridge on the same wall! After another round of quotes from Lowe's and Home Depot, we found out Ikea would soon be opening in Cincinnati. We waited until May to go to Ikea, mostly to avoid the crowds.
Ikea's planner allowed me to come up with a design that was preferable to the HD or Lowe's KD, and an Ikean helped me tweak a few things. We felt Ikea's cabinets were a much better value - higher quality than our budget would have allowed anywhere else, and liked the Stat door. I wasn't thrilled with the Ikea experience, but in their defense, the store was new, the employees were not quite as knowledgable at that point, and they did give me credits totaling $220 for the two return trips I had to make resulting from their mistakes, so I can't complain. They treated us well.
This was completely
DIY
. We gutted the kitchen to the studs (new insulation, radiant heat in the floor, new window, partial ceiling replacement, new electric, lighting, gas line, flooring, moving heating vent, etc). The only thing not DIY was the granite installation. We got a great deal on granite because it was prefabricated and we needed minimal cuts (Domsjo sits on top of the granite).
I am trying to block my memories of demolition. Removing plaster and lathe is something I never want to do again. The cabinets were nailed to the walls, and were too gross to
donate
, and when we removed the cabs, we could see the exterior housewrap! We didn't plan on gutting the kitchen, but as is typical with an old house, it just ended up that way.
A reduced depth high cabinet covers the chimney, and we modified cabinets to fit behind the door. We ended up using tin backsplash from American Tin ceilings (recommended by another Ikeafan) and ordered a Kraus facuet from Overstock because the window behind the sink made it impossible to use the Ikea faucet we wanted.
I need to touch up the filler paint and the wall paint (filler near base of
DW
has not been painted yet), and figure out what I want on the counters, and I need to decorate the (minimal) wallspace. IWe will also be putting a custom wine rack on top the the high cabinet to the left of the stove. Right now I feel my kitchen is maybe a little too beige and white, but accessories can dress it up. I also make up for it in other areas of the house. But, I am thrilled with my new kitchen. I have more storage and counter space than I ever imagined was possible in this house.
This website was very helpful, and being able to view the before and after pics from the
galleries
encouraged me when it felt like our kitchen would never be finished. I appreciated the assistance! Ikeafans are good people
